This is an incredibly thought-provoking show, with only five seasons.
Here are a few life lessons I managed to pick up:1: Bad decisions have a habit of compounding rapidly.2: Whatever can go wrong usually will.3: Otherwise good people end up hurting those around them when placed under strain themselves.4: A little bit of personal success quickly redeems even the worst failures.5: Lies are only quick-fix solutions in the short-term, never the long-term.6: No matter how powerful you are, there will always be somebody (or a group of somebodies) who will eat you for breakfast.
The real questions that this show poses are would we, as the (presumably) rational and law-abiding viewers, be prepared to ever break the law to provide for our families, and where would we (be able to) draw a line on that slippery slope?
If nothing else, Breaking Bad encourages empathy for criminals. We're all only a few bad decisions away from being criminals ourselves, and what shields us from that usually isn't purely our personal moral integrity (as we'd like to think) but rather our personal life circumstances.
Regardless of your past decisions, if a situation arises that places everything you hold dear at risk - in Breaking Bad's case it starts with terminal cancer and the lead character's inability to support his family - then everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant.
The real question is do we plan ahead now already and ask ourselves what we'd do in that sort of eventuality, or do we just make it up on the fly should the worst happens.
Life insurance policy, anybody?